Consistency, Fuel, Growth š±
ā Good Morning!
This is the #50 issue of SpringUp Stories š A massive thank you to everyone who has signed up so far and for the feedback, youāve given me over the past months on Twitter, by email or on Zoom calls. I hope Iāve been able to provide you with some valuable and actionable insights from the Maker/NoCoder community. Itās been quite a ride so far and two things have become clearer to me while writing this daily newsletter. First, quantity seems to be the path to quality and second, consistency is the secret to becoming a great creator as daily habits matter more than the individual outcome on any given day. š Thanks again to everyone, and please share my newsletter with anyone you think may enjoy or benefit from it. Onwards & Upwards!
Photo byĀ Clark TibbsĀ onĀ Unsplash
Fuelling The Economy
Leah Solivan is a General Partner at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture fund investing in infrastructure, consumer & marketplaces. She has written a great article for Fast Company confirming what many of us already believe: NoCode tech will enable Makers and especially Solopreneurs everywhere to start businesses without knowing any code. I completely agree that this will play a huge role in fueling economic recovery in American and elsewhere. As seen after the financial crisis in 2008, financial uncertainty empowers people to take control of their future. Currently, America is experiencing the highest unemployment since the Great Depression and some predict thatĀ a large percentage of the jobs lost are gone for good. Leah believes that this time, many Americans wonāt want to become employees again, but will want to take control of their income. Those who want to be Solopreneurs will want to bring their skills and talents online but donāt want to learn to code. NoCode solves this, by removing this big barrier. Software likeĀ Webflow,Ā Airtable, Zapier, and Bubble prove what is possible. And as they become more and more mainstream there will be a huge opportunity in the independent economy. NoCode will continue to encourage people to question their assumptions about work and the way they make money. Leah concludes that āultimately, they empower more people to advance their own financial futures and contribute to our collective recovery.ā Read more.
š Maker News
Email Subscriber Strategy
How do you reach 51K email subscribers in 14 months? Josh Howarth, from Exploding Topics, shows how they got there, step by step. They began with subreddits, followed by Indie Hackers & Facebook Groups, Hacker News, Twitter, Product Hunt, promotions and social media ads. Reddit, which Daniel Vassallo also found effective, can be a great place to find subscribers. But you need to be careful about how you interact with this community when promoting your product or service. Marketing Examples has written a great Reddit case study on the dos and donāts. Read more.
How To Be Independent
If you enjoy learning from successful Makers, John has put together a great Twitter thread on Daniel Vassallo. It collects all his top tweets with ideas and insights on how to be and remain independent. For those of you, who donāt know Daniel, he kicked off his Indie Maker career early last year after leaving a great job at AWS. Since then has built and nurtured a large Twitter audience. He also recently released a Twitter Guide on Gumroad. Read thread.
Effective Copywriting
Found this helpful Tweet by Marketing Examples from May with a number of useful tips for copywriting. These include:
Less is more,
Donāt exaggerate,
Avoid the passive voice,
Donāt kill your personality,
Avoid landing page words,
Kill adverbs & adjectives, and
More periods, fewer commas.
From my own experience writing this newsletter, I know how tough many of these can. be. A useful tool to help you is the Hemingway App, which points out when sentences are too long and hard to read, use of passive voice and use of adverbs. Read thread.
Curated Colours
If youāre unsure which colours to use for your next website design or where to use them within the design, Happy Hues by Mackenzie Child has the solution. You can select from a range of colour palettes, which then show you how these would look in a live design. Very useful. Learn more.
Protect Deep Work
Derrick Reimer, who is backed by the TinySeed startup accelerator, is on a mission to build the most user-friendly scheduling app. He wants Mighty Cal toĀ āprotect your deep workāĀ and encourage people to pick optimal times for meetings. The product is currently in beta and will be launching this summer. The pre-launch list is now open and you can Signup here.
š„ļø NoCode & Automate
Membership Websites
Corey Haines has written an in-depth tutorial on Webflow on how he built and launched a membership website without any code. Using swipefiles.co as a case study (he recently built this with Sako) you get a great insight into the five simple steps he followed in planning the site. Besides Webflow, the required software products include Memberstack, Jetboost, Airtable and an automation tool such as Zapier, Integromat or Zapier. Corey also created a video on the build process. Learn more.
Segmentation Strategies
If you want to know how to target the right people on your email list to increase your sales, this workshop is for you. Angel Marie at ConvertKit will help you learn profitable segmentation strategies. It will teach you why segmentation is necessary for email marketing and how to use tags and link triggers in your emails so you can send targeted content to your loyal buyers. Learn more and register here.
š° Funding
Donāt Take It Personally
Leslie Feinzaig has written a poignant thread on why VC investors pass on startups. Either you're solving a problem that doesn't exist or the problem exists, but there are other issues. These include targeting the wrong audience, the problem is not painful enough, the market is too small, the market is saturated or the business model might not scale. Some of these issues wonāt distract a bootstrapped indie maker as profitable businesses can still be built. For those who do seek VC funding, remember this is a painful process, especially for first-timers. Have a look at bootstrapped funds for an alternative to traditional VCs. Read thread.
š Afterthought
To finish the week, Chris Herd provides an interesting depiction of life and work Pre-Corona and Post-Corona. It seems the result of remote work is only beneficial. But as much as I love the countryside and the quality of life it provides, I would miss the diversity and cultural offerings cities offer. Take care of each other and have a great weekend!
If you enjoy my newsletter, pleaseĀ spread the wordĀ to other interested people and help grow SpringUp Stories. You can alsoĀ find me on TwitterĀ if youād like to follow my thoughts in real-time!